We Don’t Need Political Reporters. We Need Government Reporters Instead.

“Defining our job as ‘not taking sides between the two parties’ has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are.”

In a well-argued open letter to the political news media from “accountability journalist” Dan Froomkin, the idea of political reporting is called out as being unnecessary. Instead, Froomkin argues, members of the media who currently call themselves political reporters should be rebranded as government reporters. This would in turn free them to “cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.”

This is a powerful idea and one that senior media administrators should immediately try to act on.